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Writing With Artificial Intelligence

Will artificial intelligence write compelling stories someday?

Over at the Literai, a community of writers and programmers build neural nets to write “artificial fiction.” Check it out:

“Artificial fiction is now possible, mostly through the use of modern neural networks that can learn how to write in English (or any other language for that matter). Generally the writing from these neural networks isn’t very good, but it can be remarkably insightful into the patterns and styles of the genre it is taught to imitate. It is possible for anyone with a laptop to easily train neural networks and create their own artificial fiction.”

To explore this new frontier of storytelling, I created a simple neural net to write in the style of the great Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges.

Borges dreamed of “The Library of Babel,” an infinite library where “its bookshelves contain … all that is able to be expressed, in every language.”

I trained a neural net with the “Collected Fictions” of Borges so it could start writing “The AI Library of Babel.”

The fiction is still pretty much incomprehensible, but evocative:

“The mirror of Borges. Summer, so I thought, I looked by drawing to reason. The mirrors preceded him out. The voice was the river of a few monstrous magnificent spirit of false form.”

What do you think? Would you read an AI version of your favorite author?